Most of the currently available stand alone processing systems, such as stand alone vision systems, communicate with other computers or other types of processing systems such as factory automation equipment using serial communication (RS-232 or similar), digital I/O, Ethernet or other network protocols. An embedded processor sits inside a host processor and has its own processing capabilities thereby offloading processing tasks from the host processor. Embedded processors such as embedded machine vision processors typically communicate with a host processor through mechanisms such as peripheral bus mailboxes.
While these mechanisms are all appropriate and useful for communicating with other pieces of equipment in the immediate vicinity of the machine vision computer, they do little to support remote monitoring and remote control of the processing systems such as a vision computer. Another limitation of these systems is that the communication mechanism with an embedded vision processor is different from what is used in a stand alone system.
Recent innovations in networking hardware and software have made networking technology much more useful and popular. In particular, web browsers have become a universally accepted user interface found on virtually all home and office computers. Accordingly, a need and an opportunity exists for a system and method to interface an embedded processing system, such as an embedded processor, with another device, such as a host computer, using a network type protocol (network interface) without the need for traditional network type hardware.